Stargate SG-1: Sacrifice Moon Read Free Page B

Stargate begin to dial.
    Something awesome about that, watching the massive bulky thing
fire up, the inner ring begin to grind its way around. Chevrons locked,
each in turn, with heavy metallic chunks. This close to it, he felt a
surge of electricity sweep over him, not exactly static, not exactly
anything he'd felt anywhere outside of this room. His skin shivered
into gooseflesh.
    When Chevron Six encoded, the room started to shake. He rode the
turbulence with practiced ease, watched the seventh symbol lock in.
    Plasma boiled toward them in a furious explosion, reaching nearly
twenty feet straight out, and then collapsed back to form the glittering, liquid-silk entrance to the rest of the universe.
    "Wow," Carter breathed. "Just doesn't get old."
    "Hope." Jack adjusted his hat. "Carter, take point, move out of the
line of fire when you arrive. Daniel, you're next. Teal'c, behind me."
    At his nod, Carter strode up the incline of the ramp, heading for
another world.

     



t was like falling, just for an instant, into a sea of stars that blazed
and froze and tore him apart and put him back together, and then
he was falling as gravity took hold and rolled him painfully, two or
three feet.
    Jack landed flat on his back, staring up at a really bright white sun,
and heard Daniel sneeze, hard, two times.
    A black shadow occluded the sun, and Carter reached down and
hauled him to his feet, then gave the same assistance to Daniel, who
was blowing into a tissue nearby. Teal'c was up, hell, he'd probably
never even gone down.
    They were the center of attention.
    You could have heard a pin drop. The scrape of their boots on stone
sounded ridiculously loud, because nobody else was moving. There
were more people than probably even Daniel had been expecting - at
least thirty or forty in the near vicinity of the team on the landing, and
another hundred or so in the large open square below the steps.
    Jack's first tactical instinct kicked in, scanning for threats, and
came up with nothing. No weapons in evidence, nobody making hostile moves.
    Kind of a nice surprise, actually.
    The people had on a wide variety of colors and styles - long tunics,
short ones, in blues and greens and golds and prints like tartans; some
looked like silk, some like cotton. Gold trim. Sandals. Nice hair.
    Civilized sort of place.
    Everyone was standing in neat little carefully roped lines, under
canvas canopies. There were desks set up in rows in front of the lines,
too, fancy curlicued things with backless stools for chairs and men
perched on them who were writing on what looked like sheets of pale
paper.
    People had bags. Carrying bags, with handles. Some even had
wheels. There was a pallet full of bags stacked nearby, with a large sign on it in symbols that seemed to be - and this was just a guess on
Jack's part, because he'd seen enough fraternity shirts in his day -
Greek.

    "Oh my God," Daniel said numbly. "Do you see this? This is...
incredible!"
    Jack turned and looked for the MALP. The bulky robot was
parked over on the side, labeled with another sign, tucked in a corral
full of battered-looking luggage.
    "Daniel," he said slowly, "Tell me what that sign says."
    "Lost and found," Daniel translated.
    They all stood in silence and contemplated the strangeness.
    After a few seconds, the natives started talking. Loudly. Mostly
commenting to each other, pointing, but some getting argumentative
with the - staff? - sitting behind the desks. One of the functionaries
got off his chair and ran up the steps, looking anxious and harried;
he had ink-stained fingers, and his toga - tunic? - was yellowed and
frayed at the hems. Knobby knees. Definitely a working-class man.
    Jack backed off from the frenzied gestures and resisted the impulse
to swing the MP5 into a firing line. "Daniel? Little help?"
    Daniel was focused intently on the man's fast-firing speech. He
made the universal gesture for slower, looking uncomprehending,
and